.. this tickled my fancy and I thought that some of our European Wizzes might find a chord of interest ....

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German.

As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy (sounds so stupid, but it is true). The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter key.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

However, it is worth mentioning that German is not in fact one of the principal languages in which EU business is conducted, even though Germans might wish it otherwise. According to the abstract of an article by Paul Wood in the August-September 2004 issue of the British Institute of Linguists' magazine The Linguist:

"In other countries such as Britain, Japan and Russia, German enjoyed great eminence as a language of philosophy, culture and science until the two world wars. The country’s subsequent unpopularity, and the fact that foremost writers and scientists had left Germany in the 1930s, has led to a situation where German at the United Nations is categorised as a ‘document language’ and not as an official working language – despite Germany’s size and economic strength. There is also neglect at the EU institutions. Although German has the most native speakers of any European language and although Germany is the biggest contributor to the EU budget, documents are routinely translated into English and French only. In fact, according to one German newspaper, a recent survey of language use at the EU concluded that a mere 5% of documents are published in German. Virtually all of the 240,000 tenders that go out every year, for instance, are in French and English but not in German — let alone the other languages. This belies the commonly held belief that all EU documents are translated into each and every EU language. In much the same vein a recent survey of language use at the EU (before the 2004 accession) concluded that 54% of all spoken communication between officials is in French, 42% in English and 3% in German. Not surprisingly, the German government would like to see German take its rightful place as the third ‘super tongue’ at the EU. The Bundestag, the Lower House of the German parliament, passed a resolution to this effect in April."